The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  Pippa’s email said: ‘Matt and I are going to Bali for eight days. I’ve finished my first draft: reward! Would you like my car while we’re away?’ Cassie scrolled down to the PS, which was where Pippa always buried what she really wanted to say. She read: ‘Whenever George is asked to name an Australian writer he admires, he says, “Christina Stead” or “Patrick White”. The safely great, the safely dead. Where is his support for his fellow writers? I heard him on Radio National the other day. The interviewer called his novel a masterpiece.’

  The car was an ancient white Peugeot, liable to stall on hills. There was no air-conditioning, so Cassie drove with the windows down. She steered the heavy machine carefully around bends, proud of her thin, strong arms, picturing herself at the helm of a boat if a sea-scented north-easterly was in. One afternoon, she was driving through Annandale with Ash when he asked her to pull over. It was a sticky, overcast day, the kind of weather that turned him contemplative, and he hadn’t been saying much. He climbed out and stood with his back to the car. Along that part of Johnston Street the houses were perched high, above a long retaining wall. Ash looked at the big sandstone blocks in the wall, which was inset with an iron gate behind which steps led to the house above. His lips felt wrinkled. He waved vaguely at his surroundings as Cassie came around the car to join him. The shadow of old events lay across him. How was he to explain that the humidity, the massive, grimy stones and the trees in the gardens overhead had caused time to run backwards? For the rest of his days, Ash would believe that he now said, ‘I thought I was in a place I visited long ago, a place I dream about.’ In fact, he remained silent. Cassie saw that he needed something, so she gave him her hand. It felt as dry and papery as real life to Ash.

  At Cassie’s monthly meeting with her supervisor, Leanne explained that Cassie’s discussion of Shirley Hazzard’s fiction was unsatisfactory. While remaining perfectly still, Leanne could make her face go bigger and her eyes shrink. Since taking up her role as director of the Centre, she had seemed brusquely unimpressed by Cassie’s work. Cassie assumed, humbly, that this was because Leanne now had more glamorous and sweeping responsibilities to Australian literature than the supervision of her thesis. ‘Admiration is a problematic starting point for analysis,’ went on Leanne. ‘I have to say how surprised I am that you haven’t grasped that by now.’ The thing about Leanne was that she had a low, scented voice, excellent for conveying disappointment. It pointed out that one of Hazzard’s stories sinned in implying that a former colony’s efforts to modernise might entail painful consequences for its citizens—Cassie had failed to take the writer to task for this.

  From the edge of her chair, Cassie said, ‘But what if she was right?’ The jacaranda across the quad was in flower. A group of tourists could be seen through the window, photographing one another in front of the tree, giggling and adopting rock-star poses. Cassie, too, found a kind of freedom in the luminous purple blur. She said, ‘I mean, life in developing countries might have been as awful after independence as before—just differently awful.’ What was in her mind was something Ash had told her: that Sri Lanka, in the 1970s, was given over to national socialism. ‘Small “n”, small “s”,’ said Ash. ‘But not too far a stretch.’

  Leanne said, ‘I expect you to interrogate the colonialist point of view, Cassie, not take it over.’ She began to go through Cassie’s bibliography, finding fault. But her face had returned to its normal dimensions, for it was gratifying to have identified an ethical slippage. The previous summer, when Leanne still seemed to have time for Cassie, she had confided that she intended to take up rowing—she even invited Cassie to join her. Nothing came of the invitation, but Cassie noticed that something had sharpened her supervisor’s cheekbones. Leanne’s hair, freshly hennaed, chimed with her statement lipstick—any one of these things by itself could have made Cassie feel small and inept. Her supervisor’s old, kind voice asked, ‘Is everything all right? It’s easy to get caught up in things that carry you out of your depth.’ Cassie took this to mean that she was being informed she wasn’t cut out for academic life. Leanne was staring across the desk very intently, and Cassie looked away with a slight frown. Leanne sighed. ‘You’re still very young,’ she observed. It was the worst thing she could have said.

  Cassie came away with a list of reference works about post-colonialism. In the corridor, the Lawson specialist was just coming out of his room. He asked Cassie what she was working on. When she told him, he said, ‘Hazzard’s no good. Sentimental, women’s-magazine fiction. You’re wasting your time.’ Cassie’s bright face among all the closed, dark doors was a reminder of the last graduate student he had attracted, several years ago, a porcelain virago who attacked ‘the symbolic masculinity of the bush ethos’ with cold brilliance. What the Lawson specialist really couldn’t forgive was that in order to refute her arguments he had been obliged to dip into, and occasionally even read, Luce Irigaray.

  Cassie went on her way, round-shouldered as if she were protecting her chest. In the quad, she sat on a wall and looked up into the jacaranda. She saw that the short upper lip of each blossom was bent back to display an opaque white tongue. Light striking there was deflected outwards, creating the tree’s radiant effect. The jacaranda was itself, but so vibrantly itself that it seemed charged with hidden meaning—it could have been a sentence composed by Hazzard. Cassie took out her notebook and wrote:

  Problem with Shirley Hazzard

  1. She is a woman.

  2. She is a great artist.

  3. She is fearless.

  4. She has stayed away instead of coming home to be punished for 1–3.

  When she reported her conversation with Leanne to Ash, he replied that he wasn’t surprised. ‘Every Friday afternoon, Leanne shuts herself into her office and reads Who. Cover to cover, every week without fail. She’s a perfect example of a type in the humanities, caught between theory and trash. Of course Shirley Hazzard’s beyond her.’ Hazzard was the one Australian novelist Ash had read (under the impression that she was American).

  ‘How do you know what Leanne reads?’ asked Cassie, thrilled.

  ‘A library meeting got shifted to Friday lunchtime at short notice. Leanne sent apologies. I bumped into her later on, and she confessed why she hadn’t turned up.’ Ash went on, ‘The problem with Leanne is that she’s invented a story about Asians and wants to stick us in it.’

  Cassie was about to tell him that Leanne had objected to Hazzard’s depiction of a North African country, not an Asian one. Then it struck her that it was the first time she had heard Ash refer to Asians as ‘us’.

  He said, ‘You mustn’t repeat what I’ve told you, obviously.’

  She wondered which disclosure had alarmed him.

  It was summer, a season that lasted from the beginning of November to the end of March. Light fell in yellow sheets. The true Sydney weather set in, damp and hot. Cassie’s velvet dresses had given way to denim miniskirts and limp floral shifts. She told Ash, ‘Summer Hill’s a size 12 suburb. All the women there have two kids, and the op shops are full of the clothes they can’t fit into any more. That’s where I come in.’ The shifts, and the cotton singlets that showed her bra straps, were easier to remove than the lilac blouse but made her seem ordinary. Ash spent November marking essays in his tower. A student quoted Marx: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’ It was an observation that had long exercised Ash. It was self-evidently true. But did it matter?

  Pollution veiled the city in brownish gauze and obscured Ash’s view of Botany Bay. But if he craned his neck he could see a jacaranda flowering in a park. By the middle of the month the tree was exactly poised between fullness and decay. Ash saw a pillar that ran between a carpet and a cloud, both the colour of Cassie’s blouse. There were jacarandas in his street as well; Ash’s shoes slipped on petals after a storm. One day he saw
a wondrous thing: a car made out of flowers. Drawing closer, he realised that fallen blooms had covered an old Holden set on blocks under a tree. Ash had received an interesting email that morning. At the conference in Canberra, he had met an Iranian-Canadian anthropologist. She had skin like an apricot. Now she had wangled him an invitation to a symposium in the States. Ash was thinking about that.

  Cassie was thinking about Christmas. She was sure there would be invitations for Ash: to Yukkendrearie and the Hunter Valley and an assortment of celebrations in Sydney. Cassie hoped that he would go north with her to her parents. Pippa, to whom she confided this wish, said, ‘Parents and Christmas—sounds like the full catastrophe.’ Pippa’s aura was invariably the muddy green that signified professional resentment and low self-esteem. She had met Ash at last, at a harbourside bar one evening. Ash and Cassie got there first, and Ash ordered champagne: the real deal, French. Pippa arrived alone, perfume-first. Her hair, newly styled, was combed over her forehead. ‘It’s a pixie cut,’ said Pippa, touching it in answer to Cassie’s compliment. Ash kissed her on both cheeks. Cassie knew that Pippa would remember this display of middle-class pretension; an evil teacher in her first novel had been in the habit of campaigning for animal rights and kissing everyone she met. The Moët, too, would be a black mark.

  Pippa said, ‘Matt says hi and he’s so sorry. He got his dates mixed up—he has a school concert on tonight.’ For Ash’s benefit, she explained that Matt was a music teacher. Pippa was wearing dangly earrings, and an intensely pink dress with straps that crossed at the back. Whenever Pippa got dolled up, Cassie was reminded of weddings in their country town: the frocks, hairstyles and make-up that aspired to the social pages of provincial newspapers and whispered of tightly banked-down fear.

  Ash informed Pippa that he intended to buy her novel and read it over Christmas. ‘Oh, please don’t feel you have to,’ said Pippa. ‘You’ll probably hate it.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Well, you know. It’s a small book about a family. No one could call it a masterpiece.’

  Ash was flummoxed by this, Cassie could tell. He had spent the best part of a year in Australia but still couldn’t read the signs that shouted, Reassure me, please! He said, ‘Tell me what I should read to really get a handle on Australian fiction.’

  ‘Patrick White,’ Cassie heard. ‘Christina Stead.’ At the next table, backpackers were shouting with laughter and drinking beer. Cassie turned her head to look at the view. The view, like champagne, amplified every emotion that was offered to it. When Cassie turned back to the others, she saw that Pippa looked superb. Her neck and arms glowed. Ash mirrored her resplendence: his teeth gleamed, and his shirt. Pippa was telling him that she always kept a notebook to hand in which she recorded observations and snatches of conversation. ‘It’s a way of keeping my writing honest.’

  ‘Do you know Cassie’s theory that handwriting is dying out?’

  ‘The world is one amazement after another to Cassie,’ said Pippa with airy treachery. ‘You know she was home-schooled until the age of twelve, right?’

  That night, Cassie told Ash, ‘You’ve never asked me for suggestions about books to read.’

  ‘Darling Cassie,’ said Ash. He had recently begun to address her that way, she noticed, not just saying, ‘Darling,’ which might have suggested affection, but ‘Darling Cassie,’ as if soothing a cantankerous child. She also noticed that the reflection from the bedside lamp hung in the window in a disturbing sort of way. It occurred to her that she had ended up drinking quite a lot of champagne. ‘Darling Cassie,’ Ash went on, ‘did you hear me trying to talk to your friend about the elections? She said she couldn’t bring herself to vote for the Greens because the guy handing out their How to Vote cards looked like her father. Every conversation led back to her. A narcissist, like all artists.’

  When Cassie called Pippa to find out what she thought of Ash, Pippa said, ‘If I found him in my bed I wouldn’t sleep in the bath.’ It was a formula taken over from a young Frenchwoman who had taught at the girls’ school for a year, and still carried a corrosive charge of teenage contempt. Cassie could remember lying on her bedroom floor with Pippa’s head in her lap while they agreed that they didn’t have the same taste in men. By this they meant that Pippa was in thrall to the surly, pretty countenances of Duran Duran, while Cassie had discovered The Cure.

  Cassie told Pippa, ‘You made quite an impression on Ash. He calls you an artist.’ Early on in their relations, Cassie had hit on the strategy of dousing the envy that flickered up in her around Pippa with a stream of compliments. Even when the compliments were more or less fabrications, it worked. There remained the stark fact that Pippa was an artist and Cassie was a student. ‘Student’ brought to mind something squidgy and malformed like a snail without a shell. Cassie took her phone into her bedroom and studied herself in the mirror as she asked Pippa’s advice about Christmas. Was long, straight hair timeless and classic or just boring? She was still undecided that evening when Pippa emailed her. Cassie never opened an email from her friend without believing that it would contain magical remedies. This dated from their first year of high school when Pippa had mysteriously known the answer to everything: which bands it was safe to like, whether a French braid was tragic or cute. She had advised Cassie not to believe all the awful things she heard on the news. Then she told her different awful things.

  ‘Yesterday I went over my first draft,’ wrote Pippa. ‘Today I shredded the printout and deleted the files from my hard drive. I’ll have to start again from scratch but I feel like someone’s scraped me out with a spoon. I wish I could be a successful writer because then I wouldn’t have to want to be a successful writer.’ The PS said: ‘Matt always says he loves my writing but what does he know about books? You are so lucky to have an intellectual you can discuss your work with. Your parents will love Ash.’

  Cassie thought about the boyfriends her parents had loved: the high school basketball star, the drummer, the student vet, the Chilean, the IT guy. Her parents hadn’t met the pastry chef (married) or the architect (married, coke addict), but no doubt they would have loved them, too. There remained the question of whether Ash would love her parents. At some point on Christmas Day, Cassie’s father would bring up the subject of her ‘Nazi grandmother’. He would play his Doobie Brothers CD after lunch. Cassie’s mother would pluck absent-mindedly at the hair in her armpit. She would brew ostentatious quantities of red clover tea, and if that didn’t get Ash’s attention, she would talk about her night sweats at the breakfast table. A willow-hooped dream-catcher would sway on its hook in defiance of Cassie’s lecture on cultural appropriation. And it was quite possible that the topic of ley lines would arise. What was certain was that before the day ended, her parents would sing harmonies on ‘Desperado’. Worst of all, they would hear Ash’s crystalline English vowels but see only his eyes; they would make up a story about the blameless, wounded children of unfortunate nations and stick him in it. Having concocted a victim, they would set out to rescue him; they had attempted it with the Chilean, sending him brochures about migrant services and tins of rocky, health-giving biscuits long after he and Cassie had split up. Cassie saw that she had been crazy to consider exposing these ridiculous, cherished innocents to Ash’s excellent manners. He would explain them to her afterwards. He would say, ‘Darling Cassie, your parents exemplify a generation. They set out to make love and they ended up making money.’ Then she realised that Ash didn’t know about the killing made from the sale of the rainbow valley to a health resort. The sentence passed on her parents was her own. Love had survived her judgment and it would survive his. Her natural buoyancy reasserted itself. She would cook a perfect dhal for Ash—she had practised on friends and grown confident—and he would agree to spend Christmas with her parents.

  Meanwhile, there were to be no secrets between them, so the next time she saw Ash, Cassie told him about the embarrassing fortune that would one day be hers. ‘Of course, I would h
ave preferred Mum and Dad not to sell. But they believed they were doing the right thing by me. They don’t care about money for themselves.’ Ash received this in silence. He had never met anyone who didn’t care about money—even the most unworldly found it useful for paying the rent. On the other hand, there was nothing to say that the parents were not as naive as the daughter. Ash had seen Cassie’s face when champagne fizzed in her glass or the first frangipani flowers appeared: it denied the existence of evil, the possibility of despair. Ash was conscious of a secret wish, so shameful he could hardly examine it even in private: that something would happen to wipe that expression from Cassie’s face for all time.

  Cassie told the Ashfield Tamil, ‘I’m planning a special meal.’ It was Friday morning. The Spice Mart should have opened at ten but was still shut when Cassie got off the train at half-past. She wandered up to Liverpool Road and went into a restaurant where she drank green tea. The restaurant had a smell Cassie remembered and disliked from a stopover in Hong Kong: it made her think of noodles cooked in dirty water. Stiff red ducks were strung across the window. She left after fifteen endless minutes, thinking, If he’s not there now, I’m going to the Indians.